Reading

My daughter brought me an interesting book while I was in the hospital: Steve Berry's The Jefferson Key.  If you enjoyed The DaVinci Code, in spite of its outlandish conspirascy theory, and the just below the surface anger at the Catholic Church for its toleration of pederasts, then you might enjoy The Jefferson Key.  The hero is Cotton Malone, an agent of a supersecret intelligence task force that reports to the White House.  I don't want to spoil it for you, but it invvolves a longstanding business established under a hitherto unknown letter of marque issued by the First Congress.  A couple of years back after the hijacking of that ship off the coast of Somalia, one of my frequent co-authors was approached about writing a history of the letters of marque and reprisal provision of the Constitution. 

We never actually wrote the paper, but during preliminary research, I learned a lot about this subject, and there was much in Berry's novel that showed he knew a  lo about the subject.  If you fihnd the oddities of American history and action thrillers exciting, you may well enjoy it.

In a similar vein is Berry's The Lincoln Myth, in which a group of coonspirators headed by a renegade Mormon  U.S. Senator from Utah attemptto prove that Lincoln knew the Confederacy had the right to secede in the hopes of winning a dissolution movement in the modern  U.S.  In spite of the fact that the bad guy is really bad, and psychotic, it is clear that Berry's sympathies lie with a decentralized government.  Great fn to read.

Amazing The Stuff You Find When Writing A Novel

Artistic sorts like to imagine themselves as barriers to totalitarianism, but the reality is often closer to the artists in Woody Allen's Sleeper . I found this discussion in Lilian Karina & Marion Kant's
Hitler's Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich: